Kismet was a computer-driven (sorta) humanoid robot head, designed to display human like emotional expressions and to interact with humans and to learn those expression and when to use them appropriately much the way human infants appear to. I'm inclined to think that there are important lessons to be learned about human psychology from this.
One lesson is that as a stimulus-response mechanism, Kismet learns by observing how people react to what it does. It makes one kind of facial expression and humans act one way, it makes another and they react another way. So it can exert some control over its environment by making the appropriate expressions. Just program it to "want" to maximize certain kinds of responses and minimize others. Kizmet was apparently programmed to "want" to foster an infant/caretaker kind of relationship. So it had the makings of becoming an efficient little psychological-manipulation mechanism.
And as several people in the video below note, a great deal of what we take to be Kismet's social intelligence might be us projecting our own ideas about feelings and motives into Kizmet. Humans tend to anthropomorphize everything, to see faces in the clouds.
So the question naturally arises, are we really all that different than Kizmet? Might we be doing much the same thing all the time with each other? (And ourselves?)
Is it possible that other people's mental and emotional states aren't some mysterious things (spiritual substances?) that they possess in their heads or somewhere?
Might other people's mental and emotional states be more along the lines of interpretive categories that we attribute to those other people as part of our continuing efforts to make sense of their behavior?
Is it even possible that we are turning that same projective/interpretive process back on ourselves when we introspect? Is 'happiness' a mysterious occult something that we possess and intuit within ourselves in some unknown way, or more accurately an interpretive category that we apply to a certain set of behaviors that we display? (Even if they are neural behaviors not visible from outside.) Something that we might have evolved to want to maximize (pleasure) or minimize (pain).
Watch Kismet in action in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_conti...KRZX5KL4fA
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-...ismet.html
One lesson is that as a stimulus-response mechanism, Kismet learns by observing how people react to what it does. It makes one kind of facial expression and humans act one way, it makes another and they react another way. So it can exert some control over its environment by making the appropriate expressions. Just program it to "want" to maximize certain kinds of responses and minimize others. Kizmet was apparently programmed to "want" to foster an infant/caretaker kind of relationship. So it had the makings of becoming an efficient little psychological-manipulation mechanism.
And as several people in the video below note, a great deal of what we take to be Kismet's social intelligence might be us projecting our own ideas about feelings and motives into Kizmet. Humans tend to anthropomorphize everything, to see faces in the clouds.
So the question naturally arises, are we really all that different than Kizmet? Might we be doing much the same thing all the time with each other? (And ourselves?)
Is it possible that other people's mental and emotional states aren't some mysterious things (spiritual substances?) that they possess in their heads or somewhere?
Might other people's mental and emotional states be more along the lines of interpretive categories that we attribute to those other people as part of our continuing efforts to make sense of their behavior?
Is it even possible that we are turning that same projective/interpretive process back on ourselves when we introspect? Is 'happiness' a mysterious occult something that we possess and intuit within ourselves in some unknown way, or more accurately an interpretive category that we apply to a certain set of behaviors that we display? (Even if they are neural behaviors not visible from outside.) Something that we might have evolved to want to maximize (pleasure) or minimize (pain).
Watch Kismet in action in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_conti...KRZX5KL4fA
http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/humanoid-...ismet.html